Obamacare limbo land for health care navigators

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the troubled launch of the Healthcare.gov website in October 2013. - Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Navigators are directing people eligible for Medicaid to the state’s Medicaid site, njfamilycare.org.

"Because we discovered it was a way for people to enroll now while we await the glitches being worked out with healthcare.gov," she says.

Collinsgru says more than a third of the state’s 900,000 uninsured citizens qualify for Medicaid now that the program is being expanded.

Whether they know about it is another story.

“America is not fully versed on the Affordable Care Act,” says Karen Pollitz, a health policy analyst with Kaiser Family Foundation.

She says as federal officials scramble to get healthcare.gov off the ground, navigators are doing some good old fashioned education.

"You know a lot of people who are uninsured have had years of really unhappy history and have given up on it. And it doesn’t even occur to them that maybe it will work completely differently now," she says.

Pollitz says all the technical problems with the website have depressed enrollment.

But she points to Kentucky -- whose exchange is working well – as proof that when things work, people are willing to sign up.